As always, we begin with our usual kvetching about applying too much prefab structure or – god forbid – percentages to your novel. If anyone tells you “X has to happen by the 10 percent point”, RUN.
However, a little structure isn’t a bad thing. You need some kind of framework on which to hang your story. In a recent post, Jami Gold says that some planning early on in your story can help you avoid problems later one. Gold shares an example in which a novel’s protagonist didn’t reveal a necessary bit of backstory until nearly the end of the story, far past the point where it was needed to engender some empathy from the reader.
Gold suggests there are things that need to happen by the 25% mark in your story. While you don’t have to write any specific kind of scene by that point, there are some character bits and foreshadowing that should start to happen early on, so that you can steer your reader in your direction.
“In the first act of any story, readers need to see at least glimpses of the obstacles in the protagonist’s way of the story goal, or else readers will think there’s not a story there,” Gold says. In that first chunk of your novel, you should establish:
- The general shape of the story-sized problem
- The initial story-sized goals
- Some of the stakes/consequences if they fail to reach the goal
- Some of the obstacles/conflicts/antagonists
- Some level of commitment to the story goal by the main character
- A sense of the character’s false belief, ghost, or story wound
There’s no set point where you have to introduce these things – it might be quite early or these elements might spill out gradually. But by the 25% mark, your reader should have at least a hint about what’s going on. If you delay further, you might lose their interest. If you wait too long, your reader might be irked that you withheld necessary information about your characters.
